bob.blunderton

In the effort of trying to make the most space-constrained inner clover ramps I could, this is as close as you can get them to the overpass without more over-ride issues (for me, on 10s). This may differ for others, but it's entirely possible. Requires a lot of coaxing (for me, again), but is entirely 100% doable. You will need helper pieces (starters) and to sometimes use the eraser tool on where the overpass crosses the road below it temporarily until the ramp bad-override corrects itself. 10s crossing 10s + E2 ramps cause bad overrides for me for some reason here. Still on NAM 48.x though until I finish this and the other city tile I'm working on though. So I included one HINT sheet so you know where to click on if you get bad overrides, too. The outer ones are much further out (by a few tiles each) than necessary, but that's due to how I wanted it to look. Now, while I choose to leave some space between directions on my highways (usually), you don't need to do that. I only mentioned 'space-constrained' in the manner of referencing how close you could manage to put the inner clover ramps to the bridge. Putting the inner clover ramps that service the lower road one tile from the bridge cause override issues, so I moved those out one tile (the lower road going from top to bottom of picture, for clarification). Putting a starter piece on that one tile (between bridge overpass and ramp unit) with a 10s e2 ramp will cause the first tile of the ramp to be normal highway tile and not the tile(s) showing the beginning of the ramp gore-point / chevron separation. Also a challenge, was getting the bridge to hold some of the slope, and getting both slopes even (for me I use the train track tool to do the right slope, but there's slope mods if you feel that's more appropriate). On this install, the train track does 1.875m per tile, I would suggest it's the default slope or the one NAM put in place during install (if it did, on 0.48.x), so that's 3 tiles of slope on ground-fill, and the raised portion does the last 1.875m of slope. I won't be showing any more cloverleaf interchanges here due to being so common and having a ton of them already, but for those needing a template for one, this can be useful (so I left the grid on). Shot 045 shows the SPUI / Single point urban interchange here, a bit gussied up as it's from yesterday so I had more time to work with decorating it a bit. Shot 046 shows a nicely gussied-up interchange on the left, proper left turn lanes and slip-ramps and all, and also what would have normally been a trumpet interchange exiting the bridge, which (with an added-last-minute through-route) ended up... OH DEAR, *sigh* ... A million virtual sim-children snicker with the snickering only a group of sim-pre-teens with access to a sim-GPS can produce. That SMALL issue aside... and no, no dear moderators of incredible power, that wasn't planned, I only noticed when editing the screenshot. Yes, decided to put the road through it but still use decent curve pieces for the loops where normally the bulk space of the trumpet would have been. The shot is backed out some to show why I didn't choose to put all ramps here since there's plenty of other nearby alternatives. Not all surface-road intersections have left turn lanes needed, but I have gotten the slip ramps installed in most/all spots. For immersion reasons, and this surface-road network's area being industrial, I've tied off most all dead-ends with truck/lorry turn around loops (roundabout pieces). Did you ever have to turn an articulated lorry (commercial truck / tractor-trailer in the states) around without the proper space? I've had to do so in our lot at a previous job, it's not fun. So maybe this is just something life experiences led me to. Really need some two/three-tile-long-overhang asphalt and park/grass pieces for fillers under extremely wide networking though! Maybe I will have to make them. Included on Shot 047, just something immersive you can do to show what to do with those dead-ends where you have future cities planned but don't have time to get that tile going yet, or if you're not sure you're going to even put something there. The classic unfinished dog-leg or last phase of the highway that for decades has languished in political limbo. I'm sure we've all seen some of these somewhere. Shots 048/049 (last two) show the what'd also likely have mostly just been a trumpet interchange, but here the traffic for the majority goes in one primary direction, so a different solution was needed. Required a little creativity with the ramps, but with enough park bits and other misc goodies, it almost looks intentionally built. At-least the slopes didn't fight this one too much. Thankfully, there's an easy way to put roads under bridges in this game, even though you normally can't. Simple: Don't. Just use a level 1 bridge, and use a 1-level transition a bit before the bridge, with the road it needs to cross in between. I do this in a lot of places as it comes in super-duper handy. No fussing with water levels, or DLL things that make the game wonky or crash with memory read/write errors due to virii/spyware protection in today's processors (yes that's why your DLL's make the game crash, shut it off in BIOS/UEFI). Just cheat the system a bit by making it appear it's part of the bridge. Use of a simple bridge is required, though, to complete the look - and of-course NAM comes armed from the factory to do such things.

Another heap of interchanges, all kinds, maybe it will give y'all some ideas. Shot 032 was difficult as it was atop a very high hill/mountain grade, so it was real finicky and a bit of a bear to get it looking good with the elevation arguments each piece would put up (anyone who's built on anything but flat plains knows what I mean). Shot 030 is some type of whirlwind interchange I believe, or a turbine, something like that. Not 100% sure on the name, but I know part of it was lifted from the US Route 80 interchange with the main route into Berwick PA (it's a bit west of where interstate 80 meets PA 93). The entire interchange is not a duplicate, just (the left) half of it, which I mirrored to the other side. Other interchanges are just to throw examples of what you can do in space-restricted areas, and also lots and lots of jug-handles and maybe a compacted diamond-style interchange or two. Shot 040, I'm not sure what to call it besides 'The Nightmare', which is pretty typical of a Spaghetti interchange to which it resembles a lot. I just wanted something different. Oh it's different alright, I could have probably put 250~500k worth of population there but nope I chose THAT. THAT thing. And it shall stay. I wasted a good two hours building that thing. Just because it takes a long time, and gives you satisfaction, does not really mean it's going to be very good. However, it DOES work, and you can go anywhere from any of it's four entrance directions. Maybe next time I'll stick to some flyovers and/or a cloverleaf. Really loving the long curve pieces for mis, RHW/4, and RHW6, as they make wonderful smooth long curves when you need just that (to help you lose the grid feeling a bit more). I guess one shouldn't expect too much good to come out of someone who named their cities 'Retainingwallville' and 'Pied Rat'. Hopefully it gives someone some ideas. Apologies if the interface got in some of the screenshots. Shouldn't detract from the informational value though. This thread is great for not only sharing your ideas and creations (or in this case, monstrosities), but giving others some ideas and thus creation-motivation for themselves. -Keep up the great creations folks! *EDIT: Added shot 043, this is the one where I've finished the spaghetti interchange and thus made it look a bit more pleasant to look at.

The fact it (FA ramps + 12S) will be considered in the future w/draggable means is way better than 'NO', and is just dandy. I can understand your point with flex fly, which i understand - and 1 million lines of code is just OUCH. Looking forward to 10C highways fo-sho!

Okay, I did manage to root out a few issues by cleaning out the old version stuff that had remained, a version from 7~11 years ago! There were still 2014 dated items in here. Entirely, that was causing some issues. I did keep one file, to give me a few puzzle pieces, just for a select few that I find I need now and then such as the slip-lane pieces. ...and then I figured out I can just extend the beginning of the slip lane with a one tile drag of one way road, then connect the out-flow portion of said slip-lane with a road tile drag from the destination road - so I no longer would need that manual TULEP file for most things. I have also found that, while the 12S+E2 still acts like a petulant child that only does what IT wants when it wants, things are made much easier working with 12s + E2 ramps if you build the INSIDE lanes (median side) *AFTER* you build ALL of the OUTSIDE (right shoulder side for Americans) lanes fully. If you get stuck and it won't link up the network (red build tiles), just use the eraser to back up past the ramp on only the inside lanes - back 4~7 tiles from where you usually have built out to just past the ramp. I experience this issue commonly when building a 12s cloverleaf, and have only left stubs a few (2~3) tiles past the ends of the interchange when I go to build a little more out past the end of it (to the next interchange, for example). Which brings me to the next thing. THANK YOU FOR THE NETWORK ERASER TOOL! Seriously. That thing is Hands-of-God levels of handy when things act up or for me when my hands jitter - a very real (and common) thing in my mid 40's now. All in all, consider my issues a non-issue then if you feel the things which happened were because of the version mismatch, and keep up the great work. *Request: I could have used a 6s flex-fly piece yesterday, much like the 90 degree corner flex piece but able to go over/under other networks, but I managed to make it work with an RHW-4 flex-fly at ground level and some width transitions for now. Maybe there's a way to do that without moving networks around longitudinally? 12s FA ramps would be nice in single/dual/triple lane ramp configs, along with triple-lane "220" pieces (would be a 320 maybe?) and thus pieces for 3-tile-wide surface roads in the same vain, as for some reason I tend to build a lot of FA/Diamond interchanges (I use ortho roads for this at the moment usually with d2/e2 ramps as a work-around for now).

Common crash with DLL's is the game closes out with no mention, or gives you 'memory can not be read' or something similarly memory related / something along those lines. The game can and will still crash without DLL's, first off, just to be clear, but the following describes results of using them. I've played this game 20+ years now since it came out, so yeah I have just a bit of time under my belt here to test them out. This is often due to a memory protection and isolation feature built into the hardware of the computer, specifically to do with a setting in the UEFI (BIOS) of the PC enabling a hardware memory-protection feature in modern (last 10~12 years) processors to keep programs (virus/worm for example) from writing to OTHER memory that it doesn't have normal permission to. Now, due to MY OWN bad memory issues, I forget what this is called, but yeah that feature being enabled can cause a whole lot of crash-tastic behavior with DLL mods. On some computers, you can't even turn it OFF, or turning it OFF doesn't even help because the function might not work properly. On my computer however, DLL's *DO* crash out with a 'memory cannot be read/written' type error even though this PC stability is rock solid / not overclocked / has been stress tested to heck and back / can crank out max CPU use for hours and never have an issue, regardless of the setting in BIOS. So it's either Windows (there is a setting for memory protection!), BIOS/UEFI settings NOT working, or the option is on or got reset and I don't have a clue. I built this (3950x based) tower in 2019, and it's still going strong after doubling the RAM to 64gb and throwing in a used-but-solid and cheap 3090 the other year; so I just accept that some things just will not play nice and these DLL's happen to be it. I'm not going to make another computer just to run this game on only to have the same exact issue in the end, and in reality, a faster PC just makes it quicker for the game to get to the point with which it will crash out. I know this thread is old, but I just was searching for something and this came up. I also had this error, and it is still a thing. Use DLL mods and such - get an issue with it writing out of range or reading out of range for memory. It's either directly due to the DLLs or it's due to it overrunning the amount of memory it's allowed to use / allotted / over the 4gb or 32-bit limit. If there's one thing we all want to do, it's to make SimCity 4 crash *LESS*, not make it crash MORE. It certainly does crash a whole lot more (4x~10x) with DLL's in the mix, at-least for me here, and unfortunately I can't blame the hardware, throw money at it and thus fix it / solve the issue. Sorry for the necro-bump if it offends anyone, but at-least a little more info is out there. A debugger and a brain good with programming knowledge would shed more light on this topic, surely.

I noticed a serious slowdown related to the airport at some point. Not sure if it still does it, but it was especially evident when I first installed the NAM update and began playing again. Bulldozing the airport and sometimes even rebuilding it right away or not rebuilding it helped fix it (which the city 'used' but didn't seem to recognize because it kept asking 'mayor getting the business about airport' or 'business clamor for airport glamour' notes on the message feed thing). Leads me to believe since it doesn't do it, it was an artifact of not removing all the old NAM files prior to upgrading. Was a miracle it worked at all. I know for the other user, this is likely solved; but I just wanted to throw that out there in-case someone gets a serious case of slowdown! This is a non-issue over here these days as I've double-checked and haven't had it in the last 2~3 days. Now if I could just get the Tulep puzzle pieces from the old version (for one way roads, roads, avenues etc), I'd be alright. They aren't there (neither is the menu button) any more. Got it back!

The small slip lanes on four corners (just before and after the end of the tan walls that are sound barriers for the highway), I re-installed the NAM and I've lost access to get these pieces. I didn't change anything, I just removed the folder and reinstalled it. Now my avenue/one way ramp pieces work and don't show up red all the time. (This was due to not removing an OLD version) But as I've stated, I lost access to these pieces and they REALLY help things. I'd like to know what files to put in, as I've saved the old version and I still have the NAM install files too for v48. Please let me know, thanks. Also edited my other post to include the picture of the bug. D1 flex ramps on 8s just plain do NOT work. They break every time. At which point, I just bulldozed the highway and was done with attempting it. I built the same set of 8 ramps and they broke over ONE DOZEN different times. While I do have patience, I just resigned that I will not use 8s highway sections except with FA ramps and between pairs of 12s E2/D2 ramps. Now back to regularly scheduled swearing at E2 flex ramps VS 12S and why it likes to throw fits CONSTANTLY. (please make that thing LESS cranky). EDIT: Still the best mod for SimCity 4 hands-down. Have been using for around 20 years now since it was just a maxis highway upgrade plus rhw4 & 6s. EDIT: Got these back! It ended up being the file from the old version that was: NetworkAddonMod_TurningLanes_Extension_Plugin Works great now and gives me my missing menu button back in NAM 48!

I found a bug when using a wide flex curve skinned with RHW-4 up to a 12s E2 ramp, but it only did it in ONE direction ONE time at an entire interchange. I was able to fix with an override tile and this cause it to jump one tile further down the ramp, clicking around a few times corrected this and it was fine. I included a pic, but I've only seen this once and I've used this ramp 50 times or more. I've used the wider radii curves only a few times with E2 ramps on 12S. Looking forward to 10C, and some more options for splitting 10S / 12S highways off at splits (e.g. dual lane inner ramps or 'left-hand exits' and other similar things, give us some more options there please) or maybe some pieces for the 6/7 lane surface roads to interchange with the diamond FA ramp setups like the 120/220's where it interfaces with the surface road. Can always make models here, I've built Los Injurus city for BeamNG Drive and it's got TONS of collada-format models that are all modular; so if you need something, I just might have it here and if not I can easily make it. Can work some wonders with textures, too. Cannot seem to upload a graphic here showing this issue without getting an Error Code: AUE-05 error. Sorry. Well I tried! Keep up the great work. Makes this game THE city builder for adults. I can't even look at the freeways in Skylines, they look like something a 4 year old would draw. Also, something else I noticed. Any of the surface road ramps in the road menu (vs the highway menu) come up red and just say unsuitable area except about 3 or so of them really far into the tab cycle which don't build correctly when I try to build them. Any idea on this or an old version possibly messing things up with NAM 48? Don't have any other issues though.

If you should ever lose motivation, think of why you started doing what you're trying to do in the first place. Also, with buildings, look up pictures of similar buildings for ideas. It might jump-start some ideas in your brain or make you want to get back into it. The twisted building is a new trend in architecture for large towers and also the home with the Mansard roof is rather nicely detailed and believable / thankfully not cartoon-y.

Added some more stuff as I've started another city to feed a 4+ million population monster on a neighboring tile. This is an Industrial/Commercial center and thus it's all commuter traffic. No residences here. No dirty industry for that matter, either. I spent longer on the infrastructure and terracing work than I did on building the actual city and surface streets by long and far. Included is one interchange that would have been a 3-y except you can't make all directional changes here, since it doesn't need all of them just neighbor connections TO the city itself. So I settled just for a boring branching off dressed up with the beautiful wide curves they give you for RHW4 and 6S. Love those nice wide angles. The denizens trying to commute can take mass transit OR an alternate route using an avenue to get to the east-most section of the city. There's also a very space constrained trumpet interchange so it's been inverted a bit. Also, more of the not-quite-a-Texas-U-Turn (distributor/collector) setup as this works well, very well. Until it JAMS at 65535 which some of the highways did. However, it did this right at the end of development so IT IS WHAT IT IS. Not everything is perfect, after-all and I am perfectly OK with a realistically jammed highway here or there (provided it doesn't outright destroy the city or the plans for it). There's plenty of subway stations every 10~20 tiles, so there is an alternative, plus a few bus stops for good measure (though they don't get much used in an industrial city like this, they're more there out of habit). 24 - distributor/collector 25 - slightly malformed / morphed trumpet due to space constraints 26 - where the highways split, going to separate cities. 27 - overview so you can see how this all comes together and works OK for the most part - still better than 80% of US cities do! 28 - level crossing, this isn't an issue as there isn't a ton of conflicting traffic here. Good solution for a low-conflict low-volume corridor is a level crossing. There's actually a lot of instances of rural routes that are state highways which seem just like interstates but do feature periodic low-volume level crossings here in TN, but I've seen them other places as well. They can be quite dangerous especially without a traffic light, especially if the folks come off a highway and haven't started paying attention enough to be mindful of cross traffic. CRUNCH. They're still building them, too. In-fact, they're building one just less than a mile from my own house. Hopefully this isn't too many repeat posts, but they're generally each a separate city or on separate days. Let me know if so, but I'll probably take another 48 hours at-least before I post any more. --Cheers and give the NAM team my regards if anyone on the team should see this. This thing is awesome-sauce. SC4+NAM= City builder for adults and infrastructure 'nerds' alike.

So I decided with it being so cold and snowy outside (yes even in middle TN we get snow!), I'd put away the cat launcher I'm prototyping and get back to regularly-scheduled days I lose over playing SimCity 4. Oh dear. Built more stuff. More of the same. Gotta love the under-network overhang pieces for decorating things nicely, what a brilliant idea all the way back from 2005~2006 or so. Hard to believe it's over 20 years now. Started doing a trick with the wall/fence pieces. Since I have SO many of them cluttering up the park menu (I don't use submenu thing due to the DLL causing issues with the inherent memory protection blocking it's bad out of page reads), I decided to use them to make the raised highway look solid underneath much like Texas does with it's distributor/collector and Texas U-turn style interchanges (there aren't Texas U-turns here, they lack they u-turn, but they ARE pretty much everything else and they work wonderfully). Figured out that the height change of one level for a highway, can clear an avenue on the very 1st and 2nd tiles (vs 2nd and 3rd with a space) immediately after the top of the grade change. It used to need a space for stability but nope, it'll go right over that avenue allowing you to bring your ramps one tile closer. Lots of swearing was involved in building those 12S highway dual-dedicated-lane ramps though. That really needs improvement. Using a E2 or 2E ramp on a 12S invokes much rage when you get 'unsuitable area to build network' on YES very level ground. More like 'unsuitable area to build neverwork'. Sometimes they are fine, often they are not and won't allow highway to be dragged over / up to them due to unstable conditions. About that swearing... If I was catholic, I think my name would be on the 'dedicated by' plaque on the confessional - but thankfully with Methodist denomination we don't do confessionals. Thankfully I got the bright idea to save, exit to region, then go back into the city and they built fine. The build rules just got their 'stuff' tangled and that all there was to it - since restarting made it much less temper-mental. So for those out there working with dual-exit-lane ramps, on 12S, and it does NOT want to cooperate, make good use of the red X (NAM per-square removal tool) as it's a lot less destructive, unhooking said ramp, use starters and also make sure to re-load the city first and foremost before you knock out what you've already built. It will save a lot of pain as sometimes there is absolutely positively NO use in trying to get it to play nice. This must be the price we pay for Jerry-rigging the game to do what we want it to do, or close to it. I can only hope the community crowd-funds buying the source code off EA one day. I think that'd be the ultimate victory for this site - and it's not like they're making SimCity anymore. That said, there is still NO better highway building simulator, not even my very own project called Los Injurus for BeamNG Drive with it's modular highway pieces, allowing you to highway yourself to pieces in a driving/crashing simulator (if you can beat the learning curve on level building). Always loved building infrastructure. Just hope SC4 + NAM works on Linux to some end, because THAT is what my next computer will have on it. No more Windows for me, nope, after the disaster that is Win10 - I'm done. EDIT: Added a pair of shots of the region-view so you can see there's a reason for these huge highways. Certainly not a money pit nor a road to nowhere, except where the city doesn't exist yet. Get yourself the RING OF FIRE region if you want something HUGE/ENDLESS by setting some time aside for importing and rendering it (plus entering pre-city mode for each tile to render it up nice to see on region view). Just know if you import/create the region, don't use 'match edges' on god-mode tools until you've loaded all 8 surrounding tiles or it'll level edge-height to 0 height (underwater). It does have hundreds of large tiles, however. Never ever leave the house again!

Thank You Sir! Appreciate it and really love the site here and won't abuse the ability to be here and try to contribute. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- @OBthe2nd I didn't mean the viaduct, I meant the texture used on the terrain that conforms to the slopes, so that it looks like a concrete cap on-top of the normally grass barren slopes. I use a LOT of these things on hills terracing the heck out of the terrain (I could literally spend an entire day making terraced mountains and did such over the weekend quite happily). You can see a small sliver of this (I've done 10x times that high or more, literally about half the max height of terrain) in one of the shots. Unlimited patience can be a wonderful thing. I added a picture to the roster of pictures that says on it 'what concrete wall is this?' on it. Orange arrows pointing to it, it's not my shot, it's work done by @TakemeThere and I was curious what slope-conforming concrete wall it is. Just a flat surface of parged concrete. --------------------------------------------- Using screenshot names, Shot 7 and shot 8 are a nice variation of what would have otherwise been a basic trumpet interchange. Not sure what the interchange is called in shot 9 or 10, but I've been using these since the 10-lane RHW came out or shortly before, somewhere around about 2009~2011 I started doing those. They're effective to a certain point, if you have more than one screen of max-density (CAM used) buildings, they'll plug up especially with a lot of through traffic and thus leading you to need to add fly-overs, else you can use tunneling under the roundabout with the built-in feature of said roundabouts, or do a complete clean-sheet re-design of the interchange. Even a single screen of max density residential can jam those if the conditions are ripe for it! Shot 11 is a variation on a diamond interchange, while not a perfect diamond, it gives room to use the dual-left-turn lanes plus a bit more room to stack up cars in the queue. This allows to build a bigger traffic platoon up and more effectively use less signal phase changes while being able to move more cars. Really happy with that one and will keep my screenshot up when I need to duplicate it later. I tend to use a lot of diamond interchanges as they handle a LOT of traffic while using only a little space. These are really effective, and I've had a city of over 4 million people that has a ton of them in it without much issue by not over-loading any of them. Plus these have the real-world benefit of not backing up cars exiting the highway on the off-ramp (in the traffic queue on the off-ramp) onto the highway, which is very very VERY bad, by giving space for a large rush-hour queue to form. This is the main form of interchange here in TN, seems like the default anyways, and is even used in cities unless it's interfacing directly with another highway. Then they tend to go to cloverleafs and then quickly to fly-over stacks. Conversely in PA they used to use a LOT of jug-handle interchanges dating back to the original Eisenhower days (in places with limited room for ramps or the room for proper length merge aprons is not given, constant on-flow to the highway causes jam-ups as people slow to allow cars to merge, or where weaving causes accidents, jug-handles can out-perform cloverleafs by allowing large traffic platoons to build in a queue. This while not overloading the highway or surface road due to the surface road's traffic signal phase timing, including quiet periods preventing left-turn traffic from entering the highway, which allow highway traffic or surface road traffic to pass unaffected by vehicles getting on the freeway thus recovering some speed / flow rate, preventing repeated small few-MPH slow-downs on the freeway at the merge apron from accumulating into a grid-lock bumper to bumper traffic jam). To be technical: Depending on the setup, some right-turn traffic can still enter the jug-handle to get on the highway from the surface street regardless of light cycle/phase, but it's often at either another location further out or it's got a better merge apron, or it isn't enough volume that it'll cause an issue with cars already on the highway. About 10~12 years ago, Penndot ripped out the MacArthur Rd / Route 22 cloverleaf (Allentown at the Lehigh Valley Mall, adjacent to the mall lot immediately SW of the mall) and changed it into a jug-handle interchange. This did certainly improve things by allowing less traffic to conflict on the highway directly under the surface road (at the road overpass) as cars entering the highway fought with both through traffic and cars trying to get off the highway at the exit merely 50~100 feet ahead. It also paced traffic better by allowing less constant free-flow and giving the highway vehicles time/space to recover speed and following distance from the previous platoon of vehicles entering said highway. It also allows vehicles to exit the highway BEFORE anyone tries to enter it thus giving space for entering traffic - something cloverleafs fail at on both the surface road and highway, that jug-handles and flyovers (and whirlwind/turbines) address to varying degrees of efficiency. That lack of space and vehicles conflicting while trying to enter/exit on the cloverleaf not only caused backups on onramps and the highway due to short aprons under/over the bridge and just plain lack of room causing ramp traffic to have to stop to yield to existing highway traffic + exiting traffic then try to stand on the gas pedal to get up to speed in 50~75 feet, but lots of accidents - and injuries - too. Another benefit is that highway traffic won't overload the surface street as easily as a constant-flow design will, which is something city/county planners notice often only after the fact of adding more lanes to the highway. Excess traffic volume on the off-ramps isn't such an issue with smart modern traffic signals, as an overflow sensor will trip when the queue of cars back up all the way down the off-ramp near to the highway itself (dangerous!), where a vehicle stopped for more than 2 seconds on that sensor will cause the light to go green (priority request for immediate signal phase change) for off-ramp traffic until the queue (noted by sensors closer to the light) has emptied out there-in resuming normal phase/cycle length unless the condition happens again. You can find overflow sensors a half-block to full block ahead of the light, or wherever they don't want traffic jams to build up to (such as another intersection or nearly the very start of an off-ramp). Try using one of those short merges on an on-ramp with a 60hp 4-cylinder manual-shift diesel with no turbo, or a 70-something horsepower 91 Subaru Loyale in rush hour. It will make you re-think your route next time, for sure. Used to live up there many years ago - grew up there - but went through about 10 years ago, and surprise surprise there wasn't a backup starting at 1300 hours lasting until 1900 hours on any given weekday. On shot 11 I raised the surface road up at the end of the ramps just so I didn't have to fuss with the 'unsuitable grade for construction' issues that can make you batty after enough of it (I've learned to use isolated islands / single tiles of road or track to keep grade level, and to level it out in the first place, and road also has the added benefit when making terraced embankments of properly folding diagonal terrain/earth corners so they aren't kinked if you plop it on-top the kinked portion when it's too steep / height difference too great to auto-re-grade upward thus it'll build a concrete base on two or three sides / fixing the terrain, bulldoze it away and the kinked terrain is fixed). Sorry for the extended write-up, but it is relevant isn't it now? Figured this would be THE place to share it. There's a whole lot to interchanges, signals, signs, grade, turn radii, and all the rest of the works. Only wish I could make use of more of the info trapped in my head.

@TakemeThere Good job on a small interchange. Small interchanges that don't alleviate traffic solely through knocking down a huge portion of the city & thus reducing demand are always a big hit. Question now, is what concrete texture is that you use on the sloped pieces as embankments? It's a nice clean parged concrete and I've not seen that one before. Was looking for something simple and functional just like that last night. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So I figured I'd contribute to the thread, in-stead of just adding a reply to someone which may just be off-topic and get deleted. In reality, I've been playing this since I bought the retail game new upon release, way back when I was in my first house. I remember when RHW came out, it was amazing. Finally, I could build my own highways. Then it came out with 8 and 10 lane versions and wow, that fully let out the closet-infrastructure-nerd I didn't know I had, in me. Disappointed by Cities Slideshow, I still play this game after over 20 years. So entirely, thanks for this thread. I've been watching it since 2005 or 2006 or something like that, whenever it was new and there was one or two pages to it. Surprised that it is still here after ALL THIS TIME. Seriously. I didn't even need to look at it on the wayback machine. QUESTIONS: Is there non-video tutorials anywhere about using the elevated rail to connect things, or tutorials to making things extra-compact? I heard something about using this to make transitions without having to manually place them. I am lost about this part. Also is there a listing of all the puzzle pieces available for surface roads (not the highway, the city streets/avenues/roads/etc) when I need an index of them to see if something is possible to build? Please don't respond with the web page of the general NAM wiki, I didn't see it there and won't find it any better the 65535th time I look, I just was looking for an index of the pieces.